The Statue of Lady Justice may have the right idea for helping people listen to each other so they can work together to solve problems.

If justice wears a blindfold, maybe the rest of us should, too.

That’s just one lesson I’ve learned from watching Gabriel Kahan lead democratic processes called creative assemblies.

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Kahan is an unusual figure in California and in the democratic world. Democratic processes that engage regular people, instead of just politicians, are growing more popular in the U.S. — from participatory budgeting (a Brazilian invention) to deliberative assemblies (from Europe and Japan).

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But Kahan, working in Southern California, has developed his own method for helping people bridge divides and understand local problems. And he has applied it in dozens of convenings within institutions from the Los Angeles Police Department to Hollywood and in places from Bel Air to Watts.

These creative assemblies have a California flavor, fusing art, pedagogy, collective intelligence and, yes, blindfolds.

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Kahan asks participants to don blindfolds to get them to listen more closely. Free to look around, people in group conversation listen less, he has found — they glance at their neighbors, focus on what they’ll say next and more often interrupt.

The removal of sight forces a rare form of attention. Blindfolded participants wait for sentences to end and absorb more of what fellow assembly members are saying.

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“The blindfold really helps remove the pre-conceptions from others before you start to speak,” said then-City Council Member Victor Manalo during a 2024 creative assembly in Pomona. “Listening is so important, and allowing people to finish their comments before you jump in really means you’re taking in what they’re saying.”

I got to know Kahan when we overlapped as Los Angeles-based fellows at the Berggruen Institute, a future-focused think tank that, along with foundations and governments, has sponsored many of Kahan’s convenings.

Kahan’s life path, like his assemblies, is unusual. Originally from Mexico City, Kahan was a documentary filmmaker and educational technologist before arriving at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Art, Culture and Technology program to learn more about systems design and art’s power to reshape the mind.

With an engineering professor, Kahan developed a collaborative learning method to help diverse groups think through possible designs for complex systems and problem-solving. One insight of theirs: People who didn’t get along could come together by creating art together.

More than a decade ago, family obligations brought Kahan to Los Angeles. There, he began working with L.A.’s neighborhood councils, which struggle to find common ground. Kahan held five assemblies in Watts and then had follow-ups with gang task forces. The goal was to bring Black and Latino neighbors together to make their neighborhoods more peaceful.

Kahan, quiet and unassuming, does not pursue particular policy changes. His goal is to help antagonistic groups understand each other — by creating mind space for ideas and ways to navigate complexity creatively.

People in his assemblies build sculptures together — attaching mixed media materials and their own items and drawings to acrylic and steel frames. The artwork helps participants visualize the interconnectedness of mutual problems.

Kahan said that, as people create together, they develop collective intelligence.  

“It’s all meant to create the space for new forms of thinking,” Kahan said during a creative assembly last year on artificial intelligence and Hollywood. “I know this can seem a bit bizarre, but it breaks power structures and preconceived political concepts between people and inverts perspective.”

Kahan draws little attention, even when he works on hot-button topics. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, he spent two years convening assemblies with the L.A. Police Department. At first, these focused on police-community relations. But as assemblies continued, and cops put on blindfolds, the assemblies revealed that community problems were often rooted in internal department conflicts between commanders and rank-and-file officers.

One result of these assemblies was that the department gave its officers more freedom to exit their vehicles and do “walk and talks” with everyday Angelenos to build rapport.

Kahan’s assemblies can seem prophetic. Two years before the 2025 fires, he ran assemblies on fire risks on Los Angeles County’s hillsides. Kahan and experts simulated a fire with 50 mph winds, which could wipe out neighborhoods. But local emergency officials dismissed the exercise, arguing that no real fire had been so powerful. The fire that destroyed Pacific Palisades had 80 mph winds.

Recently, Kahan has been tackling AI. At a 2025 assembly, he brought together technologists and Hollywood creatives, with Mozilla Foundation support, to understand AI’s challenges and build technologies that protect creators’ interests.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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There, soft-spoken Kahan resembled a mad scientist, with curly gray-white hair, mustache, stubble and a default expression of surprise. He drew puzzled looks after urging participants “not to talk about the future because no one knows the future, and talking about it just becomes a fear hole.” Instead, he advised talking about their own individual experiences.  

They did. The assemblies produced a report, “Hollywood’s 8 rules for AI,” which influenced legislation passed last fall by the California Legislature. 

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square. 

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